When just starting out in your career, it is important to work hard and prove yourself so that you can move up.

What would you do if you became a top-performing employee only to have your boss fail to recognize your accomplishments?

That is what happened to the finance professional in this story, so eventually he took all his vacation, making his boss do his work, and then quit his job at the end of it.

Check out the details below.

Screw me on my bonus? Make me do two job? Enjoy the backwater you earned.

So back in the 90’s I was working for a European based financial firm.

U.S. offices were managed by Europeans with a regional head office in New York.

Younger employees were generally underpaid/overworked as in your first few years out of college.

The promised reward was being promoted to a Director position where the salary, perks and bonus structure would really kick in (kind of like how law firms promote their younger lawyers to partners after a long wait).

As junior associates, the only good news was that we received the same five weeks of vacation per year (plus a few weeks of sick leave) as our European counterparts.

Which for me meant a lot of camping and stay-cations during the summer since I didn’t really make enough to travel to exotic/expensive locations.

The offices were set up in a way where the business development (“BD”) Directors each had a junior associate.

The BD guys would generally network, schmooze and travel around their territories to meet clients and new prospects.

Once back in the office, the BD guys would dump their meeting notes on the desks of their junior associates to follow up and land the business, aka a “hunter/skinner” model.

As a junior associate, I was pretty busy assisting a BD so I routinely rolled over at least two weeks of vacation every year.

I had worked at the firm for three years and was starting to get antsy for a promotion.

Right after Thanksgiving, my boss in the West Coast office told me that I was being transferred and promoted to the Southeast office come the new year.

I really had no interest in working in/living in the Southeast, but I wanted to advance my career.

I rolled over my usual two weeks of vacation into the next year, so I was eligible for seven weeks of vacation that next year.

After celebrating New Year’s with my family in CA, I packed up my car and drove across the country.

Once in the new office, I settled in and met my new boss, who promptly informed me that he wasn’t actually promoting me to Director.

Though I was being given the responsibilities of the role as he judged me to be “too young” but was also told that if I demonstrated that I could do the job, I would be promoted next year.

I was upset but didn’t have a choice other than moving back home and starting from scratch so I agreed to it.

I disliked my new boss instantly as co-workers told me he was flaunting his management perks, which consisted of large allowances for housing and automobiles which were paid for by sales production from employees like myself.

Turned out he was related to a serving member of the Board of Directors back in Europe, which is how he got the job as a regional manager.

It is sad how often this type of thing happens.

Everyone knew he didn’t have the skills to do our job, so he just collected fat checks, went to expensive restaurants with friends and billed it to the company as client development.

All the while leasing a new Mercedes every two years on the company’s dime while generally being a jerk to everyone who worked for him.

During the first week I also met my junior associate, Jeremy.

We sat down and discussed some accounts that I’d inherited that were in backwater locations none of the other Directors wanted to visit.

Jeremy was professional, but I got the distinct impression Jeremy hated me though I didn’t know why.

I started traveling around to meet my clients and prospects over the next few weeks, usually spending at least 3 or 4 days on the road, back in the office on Fridays to go over follow ups on business leads with Jeremy and execute whatever paperwork needed to be taken care of.

About a month later I returned from one of my trips and learned that Jeremy had quit.

It turned out that he was mad that he’d been passed over for the position that I’d been given.

I couldn’t fault him as I probably would have done the same thing.

I asked my manager to hire someone else to back me up but he was hesitant to do so, reasoning that my client portfolio was just starting out so I could do both roles until it made sense to staff up.

I pointed out that it would be hard to be an effective business development officer if I had no support system to help grow my client portfolio, but he chose not to listen, knowing that I had little recourse but to shut up.

I spent the rest of the year working hard.

This was right before email and internet were common so executing business on the road was hard (fax machines were the bane of my existence).

Even though laptops were reserved for Directors, my boss was kind enough (heavy sarcasm) to let me use a company lap-top on which I would handle all of the paperwork to process client business from hotel business centers late at night or early in the morning.

I learned to live on 5 hours of sleep or to sleep on planes whenever I could.

After dealing with problems from some irate clients, I eventually paid for my own personal cell phone (not everyone had them in the mid 90’s and our Directors had just started getting company paid phones that year) as I had to handle customers from the road.

I just gave my personal cell number for clients to call so I could handle problems from the road.

I landed a few big clients by a combination of luck and hard work and got some solid referrals, which led to more referrals, so within a few months I was gaining some serious momentum.

Since I didn’t have an associate to help me, that meant I spent the weekends and late nights back at the office handling paperwork then back on the road during the week.

I was so busy working both sides of the job that by December of that year, I hadn’t taken my mandatory two weeks of vacation.

I had some new clients that needed to be handled by year end so I was granted a vacation waiver.

Meaning that my seven weeks of vacation would roll over into the next year (adding up to twelve weeks of vacation plus sick time for the coming year).

At least he is smart enough to do this.

It was a big hassle for HR to process the waiver but since I had produced a lot of new business, my manager was all too happy to order it done.

I wasn’t upset about working through year end, though I flew back and forth to CA for Christmas on a 24 hour turnaround.

I rationalized it, hoping that I would get paid the first big bonus of my career in a few months.

At that time, European firms paid their bonuses in mid-April while employees of U.S. based firms got their bonuses by end of January.

If you were planning on switching jobs early in the new year, working at a European firm meant that sometimes you left money on the table aka “golden handcuffs”, so the timing of switching firms was important.

I continued to work at my frenetic pace through April, taking no vacation as I was bringing in more and more clients and digging myself out of paperwork when I wasn’t on the road.

In the new year, we had some meetings about scorecards and sales goals and I led my office in a some of the categories and was number one for overall production.

Finally, in mid-April, my boss called me in and announced it was time to discuss my bonus/annual review.

I eagerly sat down, licking my chops because I was assuming my bonus would be equal to my base salary at least, if not double.

He handed me a piece of paper and it showed a number that was almost 90% less than I was expecting for my bonus.

I literally laughed out loud and told him it was a little late for an April Fool’s Joke but he wasn’t smiling.

He proceeded to tell me how proud he was of me but that since I wasn’t a Director, the bonus that I received was the maximum amount he would give me as “there wasn’t any more money in the budget”.

I sat there in shock for awhile, then kept asking the same question in different ways, basically why did he screw me on my bonus?

It was like talking to a brick wall.

Despite pointing to the scorecard that showed me as the best producer in the office, all the while having no junior associate, he wasn’t having it.

I was crushed but then asked him if he was promoting me to Director since I had demonstrated that I could produce, hoping that title would be a gateway into the big payday the following year.

He shook his head and replied, “maybe next year if you prove this year wasn’t a fluke.”

It was a gut punch.

He also rationalized that while my review was positive, I had some flaws that I needed to work on; mainly that I didn’t work very well in a team atmosphere.

I reminded him that I was a team of one so there wasn’t anybody on my team to complain about me.

It can be empowering to realize you have nothing to lose.

A switch finally flipped in my brain as I realized I’d just gotten majorly screwed and there was no changing the outcome.

I told him that I was feeling ill and would be taking some sick days, so I got up and left his office.

Co-workers said I looked as white as a ghost as I walked out of his office so they knew something was wrong.

I forwarded my incoming calls to his extension, packed up my important papers in case I decided to never come back, then headed to my apartment in a complete rage.

I called my family and told them that I needed to come home for some much deserved vacation.

So after drinking myself senseless for 48 hours and forwarding all my calls to voicemail, I called in to work the following Monday and told my boss I would be taking a vacation week.

He was pretty angry about the short notice as he’d been dealing with my irate clients contacting him about their problems since I couldn’t be reached.

He didn’t have much of a clue as to how to handle the paperwork necessary to do the work, so other associates were now being called in to help handle my workload.

I flew home and made a few calls to people I’d worked with, hoping for some job leads.

I managed to grab a lunch with an old associate who had left the firm and he gave me some ideas and contacts so I spent the rest of my vacation looking for a new job.

I knew the timing sucked, so out of options, I went back to my job the following week.

First day back I looked at my HR data and realized that I still had 11 weeks of vacation to use that year, plus a few more weeks of sick leave.

Around that time there was a company wide conference call to celebrate a big company milestone (I think the firm was 125 years old but didn’t care anymore).

To celebrate the big anniversary, we were told we would be getting an extra week of vacation that year, meaning once again I had 3 months of vacation in my account.

As a high performer, I was also selected to spend a few weeks in New York during the summer and fall for some management training, so that meant additional time out of the office.

The next month was a blur of looking at different vacations options for me to take that year.

I had accrued a lot of hotel/rental car points and frequent flier miles during the past year of traveling around.

So I spent my days in the office doing as little client work as I could get away with while spending the rest of my time on the phone with the frequent flier/hotel points customer service reps trying to squeeze as much vacation out of my miles and points as I could.

By the end of May I submitted my vacation requests, which detailed how I was going to take three months of vacation in the seven remaining months of the year.

Oh, I bet he wasn’t happy about this.

I submitted the forms to HR and within a day my boss called me in to discuss my schedule.

He realized I was basically going to be gone for almost two weeks out of every month for the rest of the year (I was wrapping my vacations around federal and bank holidays whenever I could manage it).

He told me that he was rejecting my vacation schedule since there wasn’t anybody to cover my clients in my absence.

I asked him to call in the HR rep into his office to have his stance officially on record.

He objected, but I said I wouldn’t discuss such matters without an HR rep present.

HR was called in and my boss told HR he was rejecting my vacation schedule but HR responded that I was legally entitled to take the vacation days so he couldn’t reject the request.

I also told him that, henceforth, I wouldn’t be handling any of my customers from my personal cell phone if I was out of the office so I would be forwarding my work phone to his when I was on vacation or doing business development trips.

Also told him I was going to Europe on two different trips and would be unable to be contacted since I didn’t have a company issued cell phone.

He was upset but knew that unless he promoted me to Director and issue me a cell phone, he couldn’t do anything about my new stance.

After that, I only did business development in areas where I liked to travel and more importantly, vacation.

Until that point, I had always said yes to any meetings in backwater locations if it represented a chance to land a new client.

Having learned my lesson the hard way, I didn’t want any new clients to begin with, and certainly none living in areas I didn’t like to visit.

Trips to Florida became common.

If I was traveling, I would typically spend Monday to Wednesday making very infrequent sales calls (most of my schedule was falsified with fake prospects so I could spend afternoons playing golf or hanging out at hotel pools trolling for women my age).

Then would take off Thursday and Friday with vacation/sick days so I could hang out and have fun, using hotel points to extend my stays for free.

Since I was still underpaid, I ate cheaply and learned to squeeze as much out of my trips for the least amount of money I could manage while still having fun.

My boss was now irate with all of the customer calls coming to him but he refused to hire an assistant for me so I kept forwarding my line to his when I was out of office.

Whenever I was back in the office (pretty infrequent at this point) he would routinely lambast me with verbal warnings about poor performance reviews .

I would just shrug my shoulders and tell him that maybe he was right not to promote me to Director since I was such a disappointment.

He was also angry because he’d been commended for having such a high producing office the year before (mostly courtesy of my efforts) and now he was getting a lot of heat from New York that his new client numbers were down.

Those points can really be amazing.

Since I had frequent flier miles and hotel points, but not a lot of money, I backpacked through Europe on two different two-week trips that summer and also took a number of vacations back home, diligently following up on job leads on the West Coast that I had cultivated whenever I was in the office.

By October, I started to firm up some conversations with a prospective employer back in California and finally received a concrete job offer in mid-November.

I waited until December 15th to inform my boss that I was quitting the firm and told him I would be using my two remaining weeks of vacation/sick leave so that my resignation was effective immediately.

He was surprised that I didn’t wait until April to leave but I laughed, telling him I knew he was going to screw me on my bonus anyway so the money wasn’t worth waiting around for.

He then asked me to stay through the end of January in order to give him enough time to hire and train an assistant or a replacement to handle my clients.

I refused, noting that Jeremy had quit 20 months before so he had plenty of time to prepare for this eventuality.

As I was packing up my office and informing co-workers about my departure, I got a knock on my office door from the HR rep as he wanted to conduct an exit interview.

He closed the door and I aired out all of my dirty laundry.

I told HR the firm had lost me when my boss had screwed me on my bonus, repeating the story that “there wasn’t any money in the budget”.

The HR counterpart shook his head and laughed at my bosses stupidity, noting that since Jeremy had been an employee at the beginning of the year I’d arrived, his salary and bonus was actually in the budget for the whole year.

As such, my boss could have allocated the amount that he would have paid Jeremy to my bonus, which probably would have kept me reasonably happy.

Instead, he decided to screw me over.

I moved back to California that week and started the new job the first week of January.

Three months into my new job, I got a call from a co-worker at my previous firm.

He called to tell me that after I left, HR from the head office in New York came down early in the new year to interview my former co-workers.

Apparently, my sudden departure had raised some eyebrows in New York as they viewed me as a “rising star” and questions were asked why I left so abruptly.

Apparently other employees in my office had also gotten screwed in various ways (lots of client development meal expenses were rejected for being too expensive by the guy who was routinely billing his meals with friends to the firm).

So after listening to all of the complaints, New York management decided to make a change years before he was due to be rotated back to Europe.

This will have to be good enough.

Since he was related to a guy on the Board, they couldn’t fire him, so they reassigned my old boss to some backwater farm town.

I couldn’t pronounce the town, but was told it was the kind of place that doesn’t provide perks like allowances for housing, accounts for expensive steak restaurants or a new Mercedes.

I started my own company five years back and it’s worked out pretty well.

Even though I got screwed 25 years ago, I always think about that experience fondly as I probably would have worked for a company like that for my entire life had I not been shown how companies and bosses will generally screw you over if given half a chance.

It was eye opening and put me on a path to eventually start my own firm so for that I’m forever grateful.

I always think about that situation around New Years to remind myself of how far I’ve come and for how not to treat my employees.

It is insane how often managers mess things up for themselves by mistreating employees.

Check out the comments below to see what other people have to say about this.

This person loved the story.

Here is someone who went through something similar.

This person is happy that a bad experience ended up working out well.

Bad managers are toxic.

It is depressing to think about.

Glad to see this guy ended up successful.

He definitely put in the time.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.